Tweetminster predicts the election

Ask any maven or mogul and they will tell you that this election will be the first truly digital one. But they'll use very vague terms. What we need is some cold, hard data, so it's good news that Tweetminster, a Twitter tool that analyses political tweets, today launches a study to analyse the correlations between buzz on Twitter and election results.

The study, based on research undertaken during the last general election in Japan will track the most mentioned constituencies and candidates on media buzz, anaylsing two million tweets (and counting: all new data is processed in real-time) dating back to 1 January, 2009.

To make things more interesting, Tweetminster is also making some predictions based on the data it has already analysed. Come 6 May, Labour will take 35 percent of the vote to the Conservatives' 34 percent, delivering Gordon Brown a majority of 14 seats. The Japanese survey was 90 percent accurate in its predictions. Given the same margin of error, this would make a range of hung parliament scenarios possible. The initial report also ranks the ten most influential twitterers, with Nick Clegg the only party leader included.